It certainly appears as though this will be a make-or-break season for Texas A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin. The swagger he brought with the Aggies as they entered the SEC is gone, and the tens of millions spent on renovation to Kyle Field begs for better results than the consecutive 8-5 seasons they’ve been able to produce under their beleaguered coach.

Is it even doable? Are expectations too high for this program? Can it be the surprise team in the SEC West? Well, right from the opening kick, the Aggies will be tested by a tough schedule that includes UCLA at home in the season opener and only gets stronger after that. A road game at Auburn and a neutral site matchup with Arkansas is how the Aggies open SEC play.

That’s tough, but things get brutal down the road. The Aggies host SEC East trendy pick Tennessee before visiting Alabama. If they have anything left in the tank, Texas A&M hosts Ole Miss and LSU to close SEC play.

A very good football team could still only break even over those eight games. Even if the Aggies win the other four over Prairie View A&M, South Carolina, New Mexico State, Mississippi State and UTSA, it’s still just an 8-4 season and a bowl loss away from the likelihood of another 8-5 season.

Unfortunately, that’s not good enough, and Sumlin knows that.

“Wherever I’ve been a head coach and whenever you’ve been that guy, you know that you get paid on results,” Sumlin told Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel .

He said you can look at it one of two ways. The first is the “What have you done for me lately” crowd. He gets that, but Sumlin insists the program has gotten better in the years he’s been there. Although there is merit in that line of thinking, 8-5 just doesn’t get it done, not in the overly competitive SEC West.

So Sumlin will have to squeeze out every ounce of talent from his team, and so will offensive and defensive coordinators Noel Mazzone and John Chavis, respectively.

Does the talent exist to do that? It would seem so. The Aggies were improved on defense last season in Chavis’ first at College Station. With monster bookends Myles Garrett and Daeshon Hall along the front, Texas A&M will continue to improve on that side of the football.

The bigger question, of course, is on offense. Can Oklahoma graduate transfer Trevor Knight absorb Mazzone’s scheme and make it work? Sumlin seems to think so, naming him the starter soon after spring practice concluded.

“Every team is different,” he said in a spring coach’s teleconference. “Where we are, what we are doing, the feel for leadership, when you have young guys it’s different. The body of work and leadership skills that Trevor exhibited, I felt like because of how he’s played and handled himself, he’s ready to go.”

He’d better hope so. His job appears to be riding on it. Bigger questions loom concerning the offensive line, where just one player returns who started every game in 2015. It’s the biggest area of concern for 2016 and could very well be the difference between an eight-to-10-win season and a struggle to just become bowl eligible.